The Dream is damned and Dreamer too if Dreaming's all that Dreamers do.

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

My Politics. Part I

People seem wired for a certain amount of drama. No matter how good things get, most people have to see the current times as challenging, or bad. The need to see things in a certain way or at a certain level justifies a shit ton of bullshit rationalization. So, meta-level, this is how I see things:

The world is better than ever before. In the US, poverty doesn't mean what poverty means. The poorest people I know own computers that would not have been available to any government at any price in the 1970's. If you are reading this, you have access to a computing system that didn't exist not that long ago. You cannot believe you are poor if you have access to a system that no one in your grandfather's world could have imagined. Measure. Do you have access to hot water, ice, food from multiple continents despite any season and more knowledge than you could mine in a lifetime? Then you are a god, beyond what any Roman emperor could access. and you live in a golden age.

There is an old saying about academic politics: The politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.

Here's the deal. Since the mid/late 1800's, we have an ideal. We are all products of our culture and early education, so shift this 200 years in any direction and it might make no sense, but here goes:

People matter.

Equality is important.

Individual liberty is important.

People can continuously improve.

Society can continuously improve.

A legitimate government serves the people, it does not rule the people.

And, for as long as this ideal has been held as pretty much universal, there has been a constant tension between liberty and egalitarianism. They are mutually incompatible. If you allow maximum freedom (liberty) there will be wild disparities in possession, friendships... anything you care to measure. Conversely, there is no way to have egalitarian outcomes except by controlling individuals. Yes, I am aware that there is an entire branch of political philosophy devoted to proving that there is no antagonism between freedom and equality. Any six-year-old can shatter those pathetic arguments.

A quick and dirty way to phrase this, imagine a basketball game: If you value liberty more than equality, you want the rules applied equally to the two teams. If you value equality more than liberty, you will believe that any score that doesn't end in a tie is prima facie evidence of unfairness and you will continue to tweak the rules until all games are ties.

In the dawn of the 21st century, we forget that "poor" used to mean "starving" not obesity. Not that long ago, poor people in North America couldn't read, and now they have access to free Harvard courses. That a (personal example) an eight-year-old bottom of the line economy car can outperform the hotrods we dreamed about as children.

Bringing it home, people are tribal. They seem to need an 'us' and a 'them.' The less actual difference there is, the more vicious and heated the rhetoric needs to be. Communist, fascists and socialists were never enemies because they were different. They were always enemies because their policies appealed to the same people. They were similar enough to compete for resources. Civil wars are more vicious than other wars because of the similarities between the sides, not the differences.

And this big, scary divide in US politics right now? It is really simple. We agree on almost everything... except where we should strike the balance between individual liberty and equality. And because that is such a relatively minor point, tribalism demands that we get vicious about it.

Tribalism demands. We needn't obey. (Obviously) I'm heavy on the individual liberty side. We don't need to agree. We both want people to be happy. I believe that unfettered opportunity will have that effect for more people and, as an aside, that a few people pushing the envelope changes everyone's potential. If you believe stuff makes people happy and managing the output of stuff will make more people's lives better, you aren't my enemy. We just disagree.

77 comments:

The tip about free Harvard courses is priceless, I will definitely try that, probably the Intro to Computer Science first, but many others are very interesting. I am surprised by the wide variety of courses offered for free on this Harvard website! I will probably try a class about the history of China, too. Thanks for that Harvard tip!

Also new and fresh is the concept that we argue so viciously because we are already so close to being the same, the followers of any particular topic must fight for scarce resources, fight to keep followers from a limited pool of followers. That is something to ponder and discuss, for sure. I never heard of this before.

@ "better world" - yes the poorest people today have access to things which would have seen magic to any medieval king; on the other hand, every poor miserable hungry medieval serf had access to some things which count today as a luxury, especially for people living in dense urban areas. like, that in the night it is really night, really dark - not illuminated everywhere. there was probably also a lot less noise. and, before the invention of train timetables and pocket watchs, the day was not dictated by the very strict time discipline which is normal for many of us.

I'm not so sure, if you asked a medieval serf, if he preferred to be a modern poor - or even a modern middle-class-person - if he wanted to change, given the possibility.

@equalityI feel there are different forms or aspects to equality, and it need not mean "the result is the same for every one". Taking the basketball example - in sports equality often means "the same starting position for every one", every team plays to the same rules and starts with score 0. Often it means also "opponents have roughly equal capabilities" - so you get male and female teams, you get different leagues depending on proficiency, you get teams in different age groups... because a match is more interesting when the outcome is not too clear from the beginning.

Equality in politics, I understood always "every one gets roughly the same starting position, every one gets roughly the same chances". I'm not sure if you can call a situation "liberty for everyone" if one kid starts a race with a skateboard and the other one has a Ferrari...

"The opposite of poverty is Justice." Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative EJI.org

In his TED talk, he points out that the US treats rich guilty defendants better than poor innocent defendants. He games out how a 14 year old black kid is treated as an adult, and how differently he is treated compared to a white middle aged banker.

https://www.ted.com/speakers/bryan_stevenson

The basketball game comparison doesn't really work, because only privileged teams are allowed to compete at all. There are a bunch of old, poor, young, handicapped, etc people who will never be allowed to enter the arena, much less play.

For 400 or more years, the Western World has moved in the direction of Leftism, which distilled to its essence is nothing more or less than the Gnostic Heresy, the attempt to create the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth by eliminating sin. Each law is intended to move, incrementally, to that Ideal World, that Utopia of perfection.

Sin has been redefined a few times over all that time, but today's secular version of this is that Heaven is Equality, all people are the same and unequal outcomes are evidence of sin that must be destroyed. This neo-religion has its saints (MLK, a few others), its Satan (Hitler) its catechism (Blank Slate, Magic Dirt) and its prescribed treatment of heretics (accuse them of sin--racism, sexism, homophobia, etc--and then cast them out of their occupation and polite society.)

Truths supported by mountains of objective data are buried, and anyone who resurrects them risks heretic treatment (example: IQ distribution differences between the races in America have 80 years of research to back them and are now being studied at the molecular DNA level, but there are literal calls to BAN such scientific inquiry because...heresy.)

Politically, the West has for 50 years engaged in a suicidal voyage to square circles, to literally deny biological reality in ways that make Galileo's troubles with the Church look small by comparison. This all rests on the same pervasive social mood optimism as does the largest credit bubble (credit inflation) ever recorded.

It seems like this supertanker is beginning to turn. People are not equal. Groups of people related by heredity are not equal, either, by definition. The study of Human BioDiversity (HBD) explains why descendants of peoples who spent most of the last 1500 years living under very different conditions are very different in ways that matter: Average intelligence, ability to defer gratification, genetic propensity to violence, etc. These differences cannot be washed away by laws or hand-outs or hand-ups. They are DNA deep. This truth is bubbling to the surface again after 50 years of herculean attempts to bury it. And this makes all the difference.

Anonymous 11:10 wrote: There are a bunch of old, poor, young, handicapped, etc people who will never be allowed to enter the arena, much less play.

So you think the NBA should be compelled to put me (old guy) on a team and pay me the going rate? (facepalm.)

Everyone can play the game AT THEIR LEVEL. No one says "handicapped people can't play basketball." (You're blind to wheelchair leagues?) Will a handicapped, old, stupid, untalented player get "paid" the same as one who is gifted? NO! Should you put a gun to the head of the talented and demand you, the untalented, be given a chunk of the value they produce? Why is that right, because you have less? Where do you draw the line? Equality of wealth? Why should the talented employ their talents to make us all richer, if a couch potato untalented gets the same outcome?

Your notions lead to universal poverty and misery.

You, sir, are a FOOL. You see the oligarchs and the corporatists who have bought the political system and you think you'll change the political system to rob them instead of them robbing you? You're just their sock puppet. The more powerful the central government became, ostensibly to make things better for "the poor," the greater did wealth concentrate in the hands of the cunning and unscrupulous who BOUGHT THAT SYSTEM. You and those like you cannot see that the very prescriptions you support are the one Warren Buffet, George Soros, and all other billionaire oligarchs love.

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